FBI agents ran their cases largely on paper, backed by a computer system from 1995. A first attempt at an electronic case file was scrapped in 2005 after $170 million. For the second, Sentinel, the FBI hired Lockheed Martin in 2006: a $425 million project due in December 2009. By August 2010, the Justice Department’s inspector general reported, the FBI had spent about $405 million of a revised $451 million budget, and two of the project’s four phases had been delivered. In July 2010 the bureau ordered the contractor to stop work.
That September the FBI’s chief information officer, Chad Fulgham, decided the bureau would finish Sentinel itself. Lockheed’s people on the project went from about 135 to about 10. The remaining work was broken into 670 “stories,” each a thing a user should be able to do, such as opening a case or filling in a form, and the team set out to build them in two-week sprints. Each sprint ended on schedule whether the planned work was finished or not; anything unfinished went back on the list.
The chief technology officer, Jeff Johnson, and a small team spent two years in one room with the cubicle panels taken down. One of his advisers called it a tech startup in the basement of the Hoover Building. “Once we started the full agile effort in October 2010,” Johnson said later, “we did demos every other Friday with a host of stakeholders.”
The plan was to finish development by September 2011 for $32.6 million. It didn’t. In August 2011 the project was 88 percent of the way through that schedule with 50 percent of the functionality built. With a count from every sprint, the inspector general could project the finish: at the team’s pace of about 80 story points a sprint, Sentinel would be finished around June 2012. In October 2011 a test with 743 users suffered two outages, and the FBI concluded its hardware wasn’t up to it.
The inspector general found a deeper problem too. The FBI’s own plan said work counted as complete at the end of a sprint only if it had been fully tested during that sprint, was ready for every user, and could be shown at the demo. The bureau hadn’t documented whether any accepted work met those criteria, and some had been called complete before required testing had finished. An FBI official said the team tested further after each sprint and reopened anything that failed.
Sentinel reached all FBI employees on 1 July 2012. The FBI said it came in under the $451 million budget; the inspector general noted that figure left out two years of operations and maintenance the original estimate had included. In a 2014 inspector general survey, most respondents said Sentinel had had a positive impact on the bureau’s operations. Only 42 percent of those who used its search often found what they needed, and 41 percent said indexing took them longer than in the old system.